My new Home Lab

Working at VMware provides many fantastic possibilities. One of it is a possibility to use vCloud Director based environment where you can spin up any lab you want (of course with per-user limits 😉 ). This environment has some limits and I decided to purchase new Home Lab.

After long considerations, I decided to buy well known in VMware community Supermicro E300-8D. It has amazing hardware combined with very small chassis.

I’ve decided that for maximum performance I will use all-flash vSAN. Below you will find the list of components I used in my setup:

RAM – 4 x 32GB Samsung DDR4-2133 regECC DIMM CL15

ESXi local storage – 32GB Delock SATADOM Module SATA 6Gb/ MLC

vSAN:

Flash Tier – WD Black 256GB SSD M.2 PCI-Express

Capacity Tier – Crucial MX300 2TB SATA

At the moment I am not using any managed switches (I plan to do so in the nearest future) and my lab will be entirely nested. I am in a process of building the environment and after some time I will share my thoughts how this server suits for the home lab.

I am innovative and experienced IT professional with over 12 years in the IT industry.

My experience and skills have been proven by leading vendor certifications like AWS, Alibaba Cloud, VMware, and Microsoft. I contribute to IT community and I received VMware vExpert 2014 - 2017 and VMware vExpert NSX 2017 Award.